The former anti-sleaze MP Martin Bell has urged voters to turn this week’s byelections into a referendum on the “loss of trust in public life”, as he warned that Boris Johnson’s conduct had slipped well below those of the government he successfully stood against in the 1990s.
Bell ran as an anti-sleaze unity candidate in the Cheshire constituency of Tatton in 1997, in the wake of a series of scandals that helped sink John Major’s government. However, he said that the attempts by Johnson to change rules for political ends meant things were “worse now”.
In an interview with the Observer, he called on Labour voters to vote tactically to unseat the Tories in Tiverton and Honiton, where the Lib Dems are attempting to overturn a huge 24,000 majority. He said it was similar to the majority he had had to overturn in Tatton to defeat disgraced Conservative Neil Hamilton.
“Obviously, local issues are going to be important,” he said. “But just the way that events have fallen, it is in a sense a sort of referendum on the present practice of politics and the loss of trust in public life. I really think we’re in a worse place than we were in 1997, simply because the government keeps trying to change the rules to its advantage. I think the people in both Wakefield and Tiverton have a wonderful opportunity to send a message that ‘up with this we will not put’.”
He said that the attempt last year to change Commons rules to help Owen Paterson avoid censure after a lobbying scandal, combined with the resignation of Johnson’s second ethics adviser, Lord Geidt, meant voters should send the prime minister a message about his government’s conduct. “Honestly, as bad as things were in the 1990s – in the first age of sleaze, if I may put it like that – I think they’re worse now. I was so much struck by the Owen Paterson affair last November and the attempt by the government to change the rules. The idea that you replace the committee on standards with one of your own choosing struck me as gerrymandering.
“Every week it gets worse. The government redraws the code of conduct, it puts [Geidt] in an impossible position. The Lib Dems have a much harder task in Tiverton than Labour does in Wakefield, but I know from experience that it is doable.”
Bell said that those loyal to Labour who wanted to vote for the party in Tiverton were able to do so. Unlike in his victory in 1997, Labour has not stood aside. However, he said that anyone who helped unseat the Conservatives would relish being on the “winning side”.
“Individual enthusiasts, if they’re Labour in Tiverton or a Lib Dem voter in Wakefield, they are not disenfranchised, they still have a candidate to vote for. But I think there’s a strong case for them to vote tactically. If the Tories managed to hold on to Tiverton, I think they’ll see it as a great success. But I cannot remember a byelection which is likely to have a greater national impact than these two because of the peculiar situation in which we find ourselves.
“If you’re going to be made really unhappy by not voting for your Labour candidate, you’ve got someone to vote for. But think of the impact that you can make by being, for once, on the winning side. Even the minority of Labour supporters in Tatton who really did not like the idea being thrust upon them of an outsider coming in were absolutely delighted to see the back of Neil Hamilton. I think the voters have a huge opportunity to just send a very strong message to Downing Street on Thursday.”
Having bright colours and greenery in our cities can make people happier and calmer, according to an unusual experiment involving virtual reality headsets.
A team of researchers at the University of Lille, in France, used VR to test how volunteers reacted to variations of a minimalist concrete, glass and metal urban landscape. The 36 participants walked on the spot in a laboratory wearing a VR headset with eye trackers, and researchers tweaked their surroundings, adding combinations of vegetation, as well as bright yellow and pink colours, and contrasting, angular patterns on the path.
By tracking their blink rate, the researchers learned about what the volunteers were most interested in. The participants then filled out a questionnaire about their experience.
The researchers found that the volunteers walked more slowly and their heart rate increased when they saw green vegetation in their urban setting. They also kept their heads higher, looking forward and around, instead of towards the ground. While adding and taking away colour didn’t make quite as much of a difference for the participants, they were more curious and alert when colourful patterns were added to the ground they were virtually stepping on, according to the study. According to Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell, a professor of cognitive psychology at the university and the lead author on this study, the results demonstrated that the urban experience had been made more pleasurable.
The research, published on Friday in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, suggests that making some small tweaks to the city boosts morale, even when people are experiencing them through virtual reality. “We think that the variations in human behaviour obtained in virtual reality can predict the changes that would be obtained in the natural settings,” said Delevoye-Turrell.
Michal Matlon, an architecture psychologist and consultant, who was not involved in the study, said: “I think that though most people appreciate nature in cities – they find it beautiful, and they usually react with anger when it’s taken away – they don’t fully understand how beneficial spending time in nature is.
“We often underappreciate the compounding effects that enriching ordinary places with nature can have.”
Matlon said even the smallest of changes, as demonstrated in the study, could affect the experience of someone on their way to work, for example.
The findings are part of a growing body of research into the restorative effects of vegetation and colour in urban settings.
However, Steffen Lehmann, a professor of architecture at the University of Nevada, in the US, who was not involved in the study, wondered whether a VR simulation could provide the input to back up the thesis. He said he was also concerned that the study was reductive.
“It is not particularly useful to build a scientific argument on the dichotomy, ‘concrete versus vegetation’,” he said. “[This issue] requires a more differentiated and nuanced discussion.”
Delevoye-Turrell said using VR to carry out the study was fundamental to the experiment, because testing the elements in real-life environments would mean very little control of the distractions participants experience, such as noise, traffic or weather changes.
“We have reached the technological capacities to produce a virtual environment that offers similar immersive experiences, [in contrast to] the natural settings,” said Delevoye-Turrell.
In future research, she said she planned to also measure physiological changes, such as temperature, and add smells and sound to create multi-sensory, immersive environments.
Exeter will miss its target to become a carbon neutral city by 2030 unless emissions reduce significantly, a new report by the city council’s CEO reveals.
The building sector has the highest emissions (35 per cent) followed by power (24 per cent) and transport (22 per cent). Levels from each of the remaining sectors are seven per cent or less.
The council declared a climate emergency in 2019 and pledged to work towards creating a net zero city by 2030. The target is 20 years in advance of the 2050 target set nationally.
Since January, its chief executive Karime Hassan has also been working on the city’s carbon neutral goal at Exeter City Futures, a community interest company.
Exeter currently produces just under half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide (equivalent) per year, according to a report by Mr Hassan to a council scrutiny committee, a reduction of around a third since 2008.
The report outlines how reaching the target by 2030 requires a “much greater reduction” in emissions and says significant private investment will be needed, well in excess of what the council can afford on its own.
The drop in emissions in Exeter since 2008, when they were estimated at 717 thousand tonnes of CO2, is due to ‘grid decarbonisation’ – moving away from fossil fuels like coal – which has taken place outside Exeter.
However, the current level of reducing emissions because of grid decarbonisation will not continue. Even if it did, Exeter would still be producing 291,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2030 based on current trends – “nowhere near net zero,” the report says.
Local sector reductions in buildings and transport emissions have failed to even meet previous targets set in 2007, with a lack of progress in these areas described as “particularly concerning.”
The building sector has the highest emissions (35 per cent) followed by power (24 per cent) and transport (22 per cent). Levels from each of the remaining sectors are seven per cent or less.
The document says: “Growth in the city is leading to increases in emissions and the decarbonisation of electricity cannot continue to make up for the shortfalls in these sectors. The city needs to make significant progress in buildings and transport to deliver net zero.”
Emissions from Exeter’s buildings have “hardly changed since 2008,” it adds, with almost half of the city’s homes estimated to still need more loft insulation.
Exeter has a target of 42,200 homes to be powered by heat pumps by 2030, as gas boilers are phased out, but only 449 homes currently have such a heating system.
Emissions from transport remain “stubbornly high,” the report says, stating that huge increases in electric car ownership, charging points and active travel (walking and cycling) will be needed to meet the 2030 target.
Reductions in waste emissions have also failed to materialise, with levels described as being “similar over the past four years.”
The UK’s carbon budget – a set of national targets enshrined in law – includes increasing recycling rates to 70 per cent by 2030. However, Exeter is way off meeting this target.
Just 28 per cent of the city’s waste was recycled in 2020/21 – a figure slammed as “appalling” earlier this year by one councillor who criticised the lack of a universal food waste collection service.
Kerbside collections are being be rolled out, but not particularly quickly. Currently Alphington only has access to the service, meaning most of the city’s unwanted food ends up in general rubbish. Exeter residents still have to take glass to bottle banks if they want them to be recycled, unlike most of Devon.
The council blames vehicle and driver shortages for the delays.
In the report, a senior officer says the carbon reduction findings explain “in stark terms the challenges to deliver net zero. From a financial point of view, the scale of investment required is far in excess of that which the council can afford.”
They added the authority “set aside £1 million a year ago in order to provide some resource to the project, but this in itself is clearly a tiny fraction of what is required.”
Despite this, the report concludes it is “broadly understood” what needs to be done to make Exeter carbon neutral. This includes replacing all gas boilers with heat pumps, replacing all fossil fuel cars with electric ones, producing more renewable energy from extra solar panels, retrofitting homes, improving recycling rates and “massively” increasing cycling.
“There are plenty of political, financial, legal, technical and supply chain reasons why this may be extremely challenging to deliver by 2030,” it warns, but adds there will be “opportunities for the local economy, investment, labour demand, and innovation in technology.”
A by-election deep in once-safe Conservative territory threatens to upend British politics. For the parties fighting it, the stakes are huge – but they’re picking their battles in very different ways.
It’s a hot summer morning in mid-Devon and Kayleigh Diggle stands in the bookshop she runs, feeling conflicted. The 32-year-old, who normally supports the Greens, is annoyed with the Conservative government and is considering a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrats. But the sheer relentlessness of latter’s campaign makes her recoil.
“It’s their constant leafleting,” says Kayleigh. She’s sick, too, of looking at the party’s Day-Glo yellow-and-black diamond-shaped posters (“Winning here!”) everywhere she goes. “It’s very, very, over-the-top.”
Voters in Tiverton and Honiton aren’t used to anyone having to fight quite this hard for their votes.
Kayleigh Diggle
Sprawling from the fringes of Exmoor to a stretch of the Jurassic Coast, this cluster of villages and market towns was seen until recently as an extremely safe Conservative seat.
Then erstwhile MP Neil Parish admitted watching pornography in Parliament after, by his own account, searching online for tractors.
Now there’s a by-election to replace him. Partygate, turmoil on the Tory benches and the cost of living crisis have made the 23 June vote a crucial test of the public’s mood.
And with another by-election taking place on the same day in the northern “Red Wall” battleground of Wakefield, Tiverton and Honiton has been tasked with delivering an interim verdict from the Tories’ southern base on Boris Johnson’s government.
The Lib Dems came third here in 2019, while the Conservative winning margin was a gargantuan 24,239. But having recently won a brace of safe Tory seats at by-elections in Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire, Lib Dem campaigners have poured into the seat.
However, the Conservatives are also battling hard to hold on to what was theirs, albeit with a lower-key, tightly controlled strategy that couldn’t be more different to the Lib Dems’ electoral shock and awe.
And despite talk of an informal alliance between opposition parties, Labour’s candidate, who came second here in 2019, insists she hasn’t given up the fight, either.
On Honiton’s handsome Georgian High Street, Jubilee bunting flutters against the florists and tea rooms. It’s here that the Lib Dems have set up one of their campaign headquarters in an empty shop unit.
Inside, a crudely sketched map on the wall shows where party volunteers have travelled from – Orkney, Carlisle, Kingston-upon-Hull. The party say that last weekend, 350 activists knocked on 14,000 doors.
Piles of leaflets are carefully arranged into neat bundles by polling district. Canvassers are given issues specific to each area to discuss – river pollution in Axminster, for instance, or lack of dental services here in Honiton.
In charge of directing volunteers today is Chessie Flack, 24. What gives her a political identity, she says, is “this perfect Lib Dem machine of a load of activists in socks and sandals, and they knock on every door in the constituency and they win the campaign”.
But no-one is under any illusions that overturning such a huge majority will be easy.
Chessie Flack
In a cafe across the street, the party’s candidate Richard Foord empties a pile of miniature marshmallows into his hot chocolate and stirs. Bookmakers have named him the favourite to win but he knows he’ll need all the energy he can summon.
“I think we can’t entirely take at face value the bookies’ odds as a predictor or a forecast of this election outcome,” Foord says.
“We are absolutely working for every single vote but recognising that there’s a mountain to climb, frankly.”
Richard Foord
In his Tattersall shirt, Foord, who lives locally, looks like he’s stepped out of the pages of Country Life magazine. He has the military bearing, too, of a man who spent a decade in the Army, having risen to the rank of major. On the front page of a leaflet distributed by his campaign, he is pictured in uniform above the slogan: “I served my country. Now I’m fighting for Devon.”
Along with the Union Jack bunting in the window of the campaign office, this looks a lot like a pitch to the 58% of voters in the seat who voted to leave the EU.
Earlier in the day I spotted Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, on a train heading west, and asked if his party’s “Stop Brexit” slogan under former leader Jo Swinson in 2019 damaged its chances here in 2022. He was emphatic that it didn’t: “Traditionally we’ve been strong in rural communities, Liberal Democrats have been strong in the West Country,” said Sir Ed. “So in many ways this is going back to where our roots are.”
Helen Hurford
In a 1980s estate on the fringe of Tiverton, the sun blazes down on a near-empty car park outside a community centre. Half an hour ago, the phone in my pocket buzzed and a Tory press officer summoned me here to meet candidate Helen Hurford.
Previously, the Independent reported that she had been “ordered not to speak to the media”. The Financial Times wrote that she “was being shielded from the national media” and the Times described her as “somewhat elusive”.
But now a car pulls up and out steps Hurford, in a blue dress and trainers. With a broad smile, she flatly rejects the suggestion that she’d been kept hidden from the press corps.
“If you’d wanted to find me you could have just followed me around, knocking on the doors – you would have easily found me,” she says.
Her focus, she suggests, is on the residents of Tiverton and Honiton, not reporters: “The people of the constituency come first.”
She talks about the need to improve the area’s road and rail network and support local farmers. Hurford emphasises, too, that she was born and brought up in Honiton and was the head teacher at a local school. “She has probably taught a large part of the population around here,” says local Conservative activist Luis Gordon.
It’s not the only way in which the Conservative campaign appears to have been carefully managed. While Johnson has visited the constituency during the campaign, his appearances have been low-key and without advance fanfare.
The Lib Dems have accused the prime minister of “hiding away” – but equally, it makes sense for the Tories not to take risks. “It’s a small-C and big-C Conservative area,” says Dr Hannah Bunting, a political scientist at the University of Exeter. “It would really be remarkable if we saw the seat changing hands, even under the current conditions.”
Privately, senior Lib Dem insiders concede that the Conservatives are taking this contest a lot more seriously than they did prior to their December 2021 defeat in North Shropshire.
And while national issues might be a headache for the Tory campaign, it’s not clear that the circumstances of Neil Parish’s departure are having much of an impact. The former MP, a farmer himself, enjoyed a lot of goodwill among the agricultural community, according to Richard Tucker, chair of the local National Farmers Union.
Richard Tucker
“As farmers we felt we were well represented in this area,” adds Tucker. At a recent NFU hustings, he says, “all the candidates were pretty open in acknowledging that they weren’t as agriculturally qualified as Neil. But they’re all open to learning – well, they’ve got to be.”
Issues they’ll need to have brushed up on include the government’s new food strategy, the phasing out of taxpayer-funded direct payments to farmers under an EU scheme and the surging cost of fertiliser – all of huge concern to those working in agriculture locally.
Among those contesting the by-election are the United Kingdom Independence Party, which came second in the seat in 2015, and Reform UK, which shares some of its political DNA, having also once been led by Nigel Farage.
The Green Party, which attracted more than 2,000 votes here in 2019, is also standing again.
Above all, what seems to motivate Conservative activists is the suggestion that Labour – who are concentrating their fire on Wakefield – have agreed to give the Lib Dems a free run in Tiverton and Honiton. Both opposition parties strenuously deny there has been any kind of formal agreement.
But Chris Daw, a local councillor who has been campaigning for Hurford, is visibly riled at the notion of any stitch-up. “It annoys me because I think, you know, let’s just be honest with each other,” she says. “Not just put out hints. I believe they should be straight up front and say what they’re doing.”
If anyone could confirm or deny the existence of a pact, it’s Liz Pole. This is the second time she has stood as Labour’s candidate in Tiverton and Honiton. On the previous occasion, in 2019, she earned more than 11,000 votes while finishing second, albeit distantly.
Over tea in a cafe in Cullompton, in the west of the constituency, Pole is emphatic that there has been no deal. “That is definitely not part of my political DNA whatsoever,” she says. “I’m fighting to win this constituency, I want to see Labour thriving and growing.”
Liz Pole
However, Pole, who runs a software business and has lived locally for 20 years, admits it’s “frustrating” to read articles anointing the Lib Dems as the main challengers. Remarks by nearby Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw were interpreted as calling for a Lib Dem win, although Pole says his comments were “taken a little bit out of context”.
While Labour’s big beasts, including party leader Keir Starmer and deputy Angela Rayner, have flocked to Wakefield, it’s harder to detect them in this part of Devon. Asked about this, Pole replies that she’s expecting a visit from shadow food, farming and fisheries minister Daniel Zeichner – a frontbencher, certainly, but perhaps not one with the greatest box-office appeal.
So Pole is getting help from closer to home. She says Labour has activists in each of the seat’s 24 wards and their campaign will go into each of them with her messages about affordable housing, the cost of living crisis and food strategy.
Richard Clarke, 49, has travelled here from Cawsand, south-east Cornwall, to campaign for Pole. He says that on the doorstep, voters are receptive to what she’s saying.
“People know we need a change of government – and people also know that needs to be a Labour government, because obviously you don’t get Liberal governments, unless you’re living in 1906,” he says.
There’s a sense among Labour’s activists, however, that the by-election has come at an inopportune time for the party.
Broader trends suggest traditional north-south political divides are being upended and in 2021’s local elections Labour won district council seat in Honiton, its first in East Devon for more than two decades. Parish’s resignation, some volunteers feel, interrupted that momentum.
“Voters are looking for a home, I think, and a by-election isn’t necessarily the best time to find that,” says retired academic Paul Furlong, 73, from Aveton Gifford in south Devon.
Nonetheless, Tiverton and Honiton has until Thursday to find a berth, temporary or otherwise.
East Devon Watch 